Aion Open Beta day 2

As far as open betas go this one has everything. There is servers running away hiding in corners from the rush of players. There’s lag issues once servers decide to let some people in. There are bugs caused by remnants of code the programmers forgot to comment out. There are frustrated people lighting torches and heading to NCSoft headquarters. There are those that are having great fun and no issues whatsoever, completely oblivious of all the problems others are having. It ranks among better behaving open betas for me tho. The game is playable for most part and we have made 150 sreenshots for ~30 quests so far (being uploaded/updated right now).

Here’s a summation of things discovered so far:

– The game is prone to crashing because of GameGuard for some people (let me get on the bandwagon and say that GG sux)
– game decides to disconnect from the selected server and close the client afterwards (this is normal behaviour – when you are disconnected from a server you get booted from the client. Whether this happens at server select screen or while you are questing it dosn;t matter. I am not saying this behavior is pleasant – I’m just saying this is the way things are)

Here are some of the steps that can help you with open beta issues:

• Please make sure you check out the FAQ on the beta boards to see if there are any solutions for your problems.
• Talk to customer support of NCSoft if you are having problems (either on the official site or on the beta forums)
• Twitted by Brian “Xaen” Knox: If you are getting a cannot connect to authorization server error or having issues with GameGuard please contact support for help.
• Twitted by Brian “Xaen” Knox: We are looking into all current issues including the lag. It takes time to isolate the issue so please be patient.
• Twitted by Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert (about beta forum issues): Try cookie clear, cache clear and PC reboot – beyond that we *know* that vBulletin likes acting up … stay tuned.
• Twitted by Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert: If your latency is bad, a temporary fix appears to be logging out and back in again.
• Twitted by Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert: check your firewall and try to traceroute to our servers (see beta forums General Discussion)

And here’s the last night forum post Ayase made:

I know that the latency issues must be very frustrating – believe me when I say that we feel it as well. We have the entire Production team, the Executive Producer and live operations / networking staff all working to pinpoint what is causing all these reports.

Even if I was unable to reply here throughout most of the day, I know that our Producers were active in my place, and I was still able to read and take in feedback. Much of it was useful, and a whole bulk of traceroute reports were forwarded to people who know more what to do with them, earlier during the day. We are also looking into a couple of other possibilities – some users were for an example able to alleviate latency issues by a simple client restart. It’s all being considered and with this extended period of testing we are really pushing to have it resolved before launch. The type of latency issues that many have been experiencing is not acceptable and not something that should be a part of the gaming experience with such a great game as Aion. We are devoted to finding a solution very soon and are fortunate enough to have a final beta phase to do this.

For now, I can only ask that you keep reporting what problems you are experiencing in an organized manner. Whenever you make a report be sure to include exact messages and exact procedures that lead up to the problem.

Hope this collection of different statements and problems will help someone find a solution to make their open beta experience more enjoyable.